Dr. Llŷr ap Cenydd is the developer of two well known Oculus Rift demos: Ocean Rift and (my personal favorite) Crashland. As an expert in procedural animation, Cenydd has imbued his creatures with beautiful and organic animation that’s convincing and unscripted. In a guest article, he explains some of challenges and benefits of procedural animation and explains its importance in virtual reality.
Today’s flood of content announcements following Samsung’s Gear VR announcement is starting to look like a procession of VR’s old guard classics. Darknet, Oculus Rift enabled hacking game originally conceived during an Oculus sponsored VR Jam competition (and finally coming first place) is on it’s way to Samsung’s new VR headset.
Oculus VR has released an updated version of their SDK, the Oculus SDK v0.4.2 Beta. The update includes new firmware, with a fix for the Rift DK2’s built-in latency tester, a chromatic aberration fix for headsets using the minimum eye relief, and more.
Following the Samsung Gear VR announcement and the official reveal of the “deep and integrated partnership” with Oculus, the company’s CEO, Brendan Iribe, confirms that Gear VR is but one of many ‘Powered by Oculus’ devices to come.
The virtual reality community is truly one of grassroots growth. Meetup groups for VR developers and enthusiasts are springing up around the world. A new group, VRDC, is bringing a VR meetup to the United States capital. The group’s first gathering will be held on September 8th at 6:30 PM.
Alongside being a guest contributor to RTVR through his A Wider FOV article series; Kevin Williams is a well-known figure in the immersive entertainment community—steering his consultancy KWP, he also is the chairman of the Digital Out-of-Home Entertainment Network Association (DNA), and more recently he has been associated with the launch of the latest Head Mounted Display (HMD) to enter the VR fray—in this feature he explains the thinking behind this move and the implications for the VR community in-general with this latest development.
With more than one billion downloads on mobile platforms, the Temple Run series is one of the biggest games in the mobile space. The developer behind Temple Run, Imangi Studios, is bringing a virtual reality version of the game to Samsung Gear VR.
In a brief announcement made via the /r/oculus subreddit, developer Justin Moravetz says that the once troubled Oculus Rift project Proton Pulse will finally be released in full on the new Samsung Gear VR headset.
Starting in just 10 minutes is a special edition of the Rev VR Podcast, the Samsung Gear VR Roundtable. Joining your host Reverend Kyle will be developers Justin Moravetz and E. McNeil, along with Cymatic Bruce and myself, Ben Lang.
Titans of Space, one of the early VR classics originally released for the Oculus Rift DK1, is now heading to the newly announced Samsung Gear VR headset.
Samsung revealed their Gear VR headset this morning in their IFA Unpacked press presentation in Berlin. If you weren’t able to catch the broadcast, the 10 minute Gear VR segment, with appearance by Oculus CTO John Carmack, is right here.
As more and more information piles in on the long rumoured Samsung Gear VR Headset announced at Samsung’s special event today, it’s becoming clear just how integral Oculus are to not only the hardware but also content and the delivery of that content. Oculus Home is further confirmation that Oculus VR’s long term goal is in delivering content rather than hardware.
At Samsung’s IFA Unpacked event earlier today, the company revealed a swath of big studios who are working on content for the Gear VR headset. Among them are some well known names like DreamWorks, Marvel, and IMAX, along with those known well to the VR community like Playful, the creator’s of Lucky’s Tale.
I took a look at a very early version of a DK2 enabled Senza Peso demo recently (see the above video) just after Oculus’ second VR Headset shipped and it remains one of the most impressive VR showcases out there. Seems Epic Games thought so too as they chose Kite and Lightning‘s VR mini opera to showcase Unreal Engine 4 at this year’s PAX Prime in Seattle this week.
Contrary to the grandiose presentation that Samsung gave Gear VR at their IFA Unpacked event earlier today, Gear VR will launch in 2014 first under the moniker ‘Innovator Edition’ which isn’t aimed mainstream smartphone users.
